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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."
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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."
By Bahá'u'lláh · 1891 · Bahá'í Publishing Trust
Bahá'u'lláh's ministry (1853–1892) · public domain
Last major Tablet revealed by Bahá'u'lláh, summarizing many of His teachings.
About Bahá'u'lláh
Founder of the Bahá'í Faith. Imprisoned and exiled successively from Persia to Baghdád, Constantinople, Adrianople, and finally 'Akká, where He revealed the Kitáb-i-Aqdas and the bulk of His Writings.
1817–1892 · Founder
Featured figures
“The followers of My Cause must show forth such a character,”
“such a degree of trustworthiness, that the very mention of”
“their name shall, in every quarter, be a guarantee of”
“it begins, before turning to extol”
From The Last Great Tablet: The Epistle to the Son of the Wolf
“the supreme instrument for the prosperity of the world.”
From The Last Great Tablet: The Epistle to the Son of the Wolf
As a boy, Bahá'u'lláh watched an entire royal court — king, army, and all — paraded in splendour, then folded away into a single small box. He never forgot the lesson.
In the *Epistle to the Son of the Wolf*, Bahá'u'lláh devotes a substantial passage to the spiritual significance of trustworthiness — naming it as the foundation of the Cause's standing in the world and as the mark by which the true believer is recognised.
In the *Epistle to the Son of the Wolf*, Bahá'u'lláh recounts the persecutions launched against the believers of Iṣfáhán by Áqá Najafí, the powerful Iṣfahání cleric who instigated the martyrdoms of the *King of Martyrs* and the *Beloved of Martyrs* in 1879.
In the *Epistle to the Son of the Wolf*, Bahá'u'lláh briefly recalls the conditions of His four-month imprisonment in the Síyáh-Chál of Tihrán in 1852 — the underground dungeon in which the first intimations of His Revelation came to Him.
In His final year at Bahjí, Bahá'u'lláh revealed the last major work of His pen — the Epistle to the Son of the Wolf — addressed to a cleric of Isfáhán whose father had ordered the deaths of two of the most beloved believers. Into it Bahá'u'lláh gathered passages from across His own Writings, leaving, near the end of His life, a summing-up of the Cause He had brought.
In His own words, in the Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, Bahá'u'lláh recalls the four months He spent chained in the lightless underground dungeon of Ṭihrán — and how, in that very darkness, the first intimations of His Revelation broke upon Him like a dawn, a Voice calling from above His head and a sense that the whole creation had been set astir.
In the last great Tablet of His life, Bahá'u'lláh wrote to a man whose family had hounded and slain His followers — Shaykh Muḥammad-Taqí, son of the cleric remembered as "the Wolf." He neither flattered the persecutor nor cursed him. He counselled him, reasoned with him, called him to justice and to God, and held open to him, even then, the door of forgiveness.
The longest of all the Tablets Bahá'u'lláh addressed to a single sovereign was sent from His prison to Náṣiri'd-Dín Sháh, the king of Persia. In it the Prisoner sought nothing for Himself, pleaded the cause of the oppressed believers, and made the king an astonishing offer — to be brought face to face with the divines, that the truth might be settled before the throne itself.
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